Many companies provide electronic forums associated with their products so that users of the products, and often the actual developers of the products, can communicate with one another regarding problems they encounter. A forum is a network-accessible application that provides functionality for holding discussions and exchanging information. Forums are commonly referred to as World Wide Web (“Web”) forums, message boards, discussion boards, bulletin boards, or simply forums.
People who encounter an issue with a product might visit a company's forums in an attempt to obtain information related to the issue. In order to discover relevant information, a person might search for existing forum threads (groupings of related messages that are typically in reply to one another) that relate to their issue. If the search finds a relevant, or event related, thread, the user might create a new post within the thread regarding their issue. If the search does not find any relevant threads, the user might initiate the creation of a new thread on the forum.
A user might also initiate a new thread if she is unwilling to browse through information posted on the forum to locate threads regarding the issue, is unaware that she can search the contents of the forum, or if she is unable to effectively formulate a search query to obtain relevant information. Even if a search of the forum is performed, a user may also initiate a new thread if she is unable to interpret related threads that are returned as search results or if the issue encountered by the user does not align fully with issues covered by existing threads on the forum.
As a result, it is common for new threads to be created even when other threads exist regarding the same issue. Consequently, hundreds or even thousands of threads may be created within a forum relating to a much smaller number of issues. Due to this large number of threads, identifying and triaging the particular issues that customers are posting about on a forum can become an intractable problem. As a result, from the sponsoring organization's perspective, forums have become a purely reactive venue.
It is with respect to these considerations and others that the disclosure made herein is presented.